Column by Bruce Tierney

This month's best new mysteries include a deadly oil spill, a charming francophile's mystery, the finale to Leif GW Persson's Story of a Crime Trilogy, plus an "ink-dark" psychological thriller from Kem Nunn.

Whodunit Column by Bruce Tierney

Early on in Steve Mosby’s serial killer thriller, The Murder Code, Detective Inspector Andy Hicks makes this observation about murder: “It does help to think of it like a building. You have the boardroom, the bedroom, the bar and the basement. Murder always originates in one of those rooms. Always. People kill each other for money; they do it out of jealousy or desire; they get...

Whodunit Column by Bruce Tierney

They don’t make cops much more world-weary than Moscow homicide investigator Arkady Renko, who has remained steadfast in his principles while trying to stay afloat in the vast sea of corruption that is post-Soviet Union Russia. Author Martin Cruz Smith puts it succinctly in the opening pages of his latest Renko thriller, Tatiana: “As for himself, Arkady knew he should quit the...

Whodunit Column by Bruce Tierney

Big shoes! Those are what Anne Hillerman has to fill in taking over for her father, the late best-selling writer Tony Hillerman, beloved by critics and readers alike for his iconic Navajo mysteries, which spanned a whopping 36 years. Longtime Hillerman (père) protagonists Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee are both on hand for Anne Hillerman’s debut novel, Spider Woman’s Daughter, but...

Whodunit Column by Bruce Tierney

If a magical incantation were to switch all the place names in Benjamin Black’s suspenseful new novel, Holy Orders, from Dublin and Inishowen to Barcelona or Avignon, and swap the surnames from Flynne and O’Connell to Schwartz or Yamazaki, you’d still know within 20 pages that you were reading a novel set in Ireland. It is something about the brooding tone, the competing...

Whodunit Column by Bruce Tierney

Arne Dahl’s latest thriller, Bad Blood, is sure to resonate with literary critics, as the lead victim in the book is—wait for it—a literary critic. Systematically tortured in a janitor’s closet in Newark International Airport, he dies horribly. With his penultimate fleeting thought, “he realizes that nothing he has read or written has meant anything. He might as...

Whodunit Column by Bruce Tierney

Count on Swedish writer Jens Lapidus to drag you straight into the action from page one. Forget about introductions, a lengthy plot setup or any other such coddling. Simply git-on-board and hang on for dear life. In Never Fück Up, Niklas, who lives with his mother after a tour in Iraq, and Mahmud, who’s in deep with some Turkish mobsters, are thrown together by a violent act not of their...